In a comparison between what was and what is in California, the praisers

of times past will fix upon the Indians of Carmel. The valley drained by

the river so named is a true Californian valley, bare, dotted with

chaparal, overlooked by quaint, unfinished hills. The Carmel runs by

many pleasant farms, a clear and shallow river, loved by wading kine;

and at last, as it is falling towards a quicksand and the great Pacific,

passes a ruined mission on a hill. From the mission church the eye

embraces a great field of ocean, and the ear is filled with a continuous

sound of distant breakers on the shore. But the day of the Jesuit has

gone by, the day of the Yankee has succeeded, and there is no one left

to care for the converted savage. The church is roofless and ruinous,

sea-breezes and sea-fogs, and the alternation of the rain and sunshine,

daily widening the breaches and casting the crockets from the wall. As

an antiquity in this new land, a quaint specimen of missionary

architecture, and a memorial of good deeds, it had a triple claim to

preservation from all thinking people; but neglect and abuse have been

its portion. There is no sign of American interference, save where a

headboard has been torn from a grave to be a mark for pistol bullets.

So it is with the Indians for whom it was erected. Their lands, I was

told, are being yearly encroached upon by the neighbouring American

proprietor, and with that exception no man troubles his head for the

Indians of Carmel. Only one day in the year, the day before our Guy

Fawkes, the _padre_ drives over the hill from Monterey; the little

sacristy, which is the only covered portion of the church, is filled

with seats and decorated for the service; the Indians troop together,

their bright dresses contrasting with their dark and melancholy faces;

and there, among a crowd of somewhat unsympathetic holiday-makers, you

may hear God served with perhaps more touching circumstances than in any

other temple under heaven. An Indian, stone-blind and about eighty years

of age, conducts the singing; other Indians compose the choir; yet they

have the Gregorian music at their finger ends, and pronounce the Latin

so correctly that I could follow the meaning as they sang. The

pronunciation was odd and nasal, the singing hurried and staccato. "In

saecula saeculo-hohorum," they went, with a vigorous aspirate to every

additional syllable. I have never seen faces more vividly lit up with

joy than the faces of these Indian singers. It was to them not only the

worship of God, nor an act by which they recalled and commemorated

better days, but was besides an exercise of culture, where all they knew

of art and letters was united and expressed. And it made a man's heart

sorry for the good fathers of yore who had taught them to dig and to

reap, to read and to sing, who had given them European mass-books which

they still preserve and study in their cottages, and who had now passed

away from all authority and influence in that land--to be succeeded by

greedy land-thieves and sacrilegious pistol-shots. So ugly a thing may

our Anglo-Saxon Protestantism appear beside the doings of the Society of

Jesus.

But revolution in this world succeeds to revolution. All that I say in

this paper is in a paulo-past tense. The Monterey of last year[2]

exists no longer. A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert by the

railway. Three sets of diners sit down successively to table. Invaluable

toilettes figure along the beach and between the live oaks; and Monterey

is advertised in the newspapers, and posted in the waiting-rooms at

railway stations, as a resort for wealth and fashion. Alas for the

little town! it is not strong enough to resist the influence of the

flaunting caravanserai, and the poor, quaint, penniless native gentlemen

of Monterey must perish, like a lower race, before the millionaire

vulgarians of the Big Bonanza.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] 1879.

II

SAN FRANCISCO

The Pacific coast of the United States, as you may see by the map, and

still better in that admirable book, "Two Years before the Mast," by

Dana, is one of the most exposed and shelterless on earth. The

trade-wind blows fresh; the huge Pacific swell booms along degree after

degree of an unbroken line of coast. South of the joint firth of the

Columbia and Williamette, there flows in no considerable river; south of

Puget Sound there is no protected inlet of the ocean. Along the whole

seaboard of California there are but two unexceptionable

anchorages,--the bight of the Bay of Monterey, and the inland sea that

takes its name from San Francisco.

Whether or not it was here that Drake put in in 1597, we cannot tell.

There is no other place so suitable; and yet the narrative of Francis

Pretty scarcely seems to suit the features of the scene. Viewed from

seaward, the Golden Gates should give no very English impression to

justify the name of a new Albion. On the west, the deep lies open;

nothing near but the still vexed Farallones. The coast is rough and

barren. Tamalpais, a mountain of a memorable figure, springing direct

from the sea-level, over-plumbs the narrow entrance from the north. On

the south, the loud music of the Pacific sounds along beaches and

cliffs, and among broken reefs, the sporting-place of the sea-lion.

Dismal, shifting sandhills, wrinkled by the wind, appear behind.

Perhaps, too, in the days of Drake, Tamalpais would be clothed to its

peak with the majestic redwoods.

Within the memory of persons not yet old, a mariner might have steered

into these narrows--not yet the Golden Gates--opened out the surface of

the bay--here girt with hills, there lying broad to the horizon--and

beheld a scene as empty of the presence, as pure from the handiwork, of

man, as in the days of our old sea-commander. A Spanish mission, fort,

and church took the place of those "houses of the people of the country"

which were seen by Pretty, "close to the water-side." All else would be

unchanged. Now, a generation later, a great city covers the sandhills on

the west, a growing town lies along the muddy shallows of the east;

steamboats pant continually between them from before sunrise till the

small hours of the morning; lines of great sea-going ships lie ranged at

anchor; colours fly upon the islands; and from all around the hum of

corporate life, of beaten bells, and steam, and running carriages, goes

cheerily abroad in the sunshine. Choose a place on one of the huge

throbbing ferry-boats, and, when you are midway between the city and the

suburb, look around. The air is fresh and salt as if you were at sea. On

the one hand is Oakland, gleaming white among its gardens. On the other,

to seaward, hill after hill is crowded and crowned with the palaces of

San Francisco; its long streets lie in regular bars of darkness, east

and west, across the sparkling picture; a forest of masts bristles like

bulrushes about its feet; nothing remains of the days of Drake but the

faithful trade-wind scattering the smoke, the fogs that will begin to

muster about sundown, and the fine bulk of Tamalpais looking down on San

Francisco, like Arthur's seat on Edinburgh.

Thus, in the course of a generation only, this city and its suburb have

arisen. Men are alive by the score who have hunted all over the

foundations in a dreary waste. I have dined, near the "punctual centre"

of San Francisco, with a gentleman (then newly married), who told me of

his former pleasures, wading with his fowling-piece in sand and scrub,

on the site of the house where we were dining. In this busy, moving

generation, we have all known cities to cover our boyish playgrounds, we

have all started for a country walk and stumbled on a new suburb; but I

wonder what enchantment of the Arabian Nights can have equalled this

evocation of a roaring city, in a few years of a man's life, from the

marshes and the blowing sand. Such swiftness of increase, as with an

overgrown youth, suggests a corresponding swiftness of destruction. The

sandy peninsula of San Francisco, mirroring itself on one side in the

bay, beaten on the other by the surge of the Pacific, and shaken to the

heart by frequent earthquakes, seems in itself no very durable

foundation. According to Indian tales, perhaps older than the name of

California, it once rose out of the sea in a moment, and sometime or

other shall, in a moment, sink again. No Indian, they say, cares to

linger on that doubtful land. "The earth hath bubbles as the water has,

and this is of them." Here, indeed, all is new, nature as well as towns.

The very hills of California have an unfinished look; the rains and the

streams have not yet carved them to their perfect shape. The forests

spring like mushrooms from the unexhausted soil; and they are mown down

yearly by the forest fires. We are in early geological epochs, changeful

and insecure; and we feel, as with a sculptor's model, that the author

may yet grow weary of and shatter the rough sketch.

Fancy apart, San Francisco is a city beleaguered with alarms. The lower

parts, along the bay side, sit on piles; old wrecks decaying, fish

dwelling unsunned, beneath the populous houses; and a trifling

subsidence might drown the business quarters in an hour. Earthquakes are

not only common, they are sometimes threatening in their violence; the

fear of them grows yearly on a resident; he begins with indifference,

ends in sheer panic; and no one feels safe in any but a wooden house.

Hence it comes that, in that rainless clime, the whole city is built of

timber--a woodyard of unusual extent and complication; that fires spring

up readily, and served by the unwearying trade-wind, swiftly spread;

that all over the city there are fire-signal boxes; that the sound of

the bell, telling the number of the threatened ward, is soon familiar to

the ear; and that nowhere else in the world is the art of the fireman

carried to so nice a point.

Next, perhaps, in order of strangeness to the rapidity of its

appearance, is the mingling of the races that combine to people it. The

town is essentially not Anglo-Saxon; still more essentially not

American. The Yankee and the Englishman find themselves alike in a

strange country. There are none of these touches--not of nature, and I

dare scarcely say of art--by which the Anglo-Saxon feels himself at home

in so great a diversity of lands. Here, on the contrary, are airs of

Marseilles and of Pekin. The shops along the street are like the

consulates of different nations. The passers-by vary in feature like the

slides of a magic-lantern. For we are here in that city of gold to which

adventurers congregated out of all the winds of heaven; we are in a land

that till the other day was ruled and peopled by the countrymen of

Cortes; and the sea that laves the piers of San Francisco is the ocean

of the East and of the isles of summer. There goes the Mexican,

unmistakable; there the blue-clad Chinaman with his white slippers;

there the soft-spoken, brown Kanaka, or perhaps a waif from far-away

Malaya. You hear French, German, Italian, Spanish, and English

indifferently. You taste the food of all nations in the various

restaurants; passing from a French _prix-fixe_ where every one is

French, to a roaring German ordinary where every one is German; ending,

perhaps, in a cool and silent Chinese tea-house. For every man, for

every race and nation, that city is a foreign city; humming with foreign

tongues and customs; and yet each and all have made themselves at home.

The Germans have a German theatre and innumerable beer-gardens. The

French Fall of the Bastille is celebrated with squibs and banners, and

marching patriots, as noisily as the American Fourth of July. The

Italians have their dear domestic quarter, with Italian caricatures in

the windows, Chianti and polenta in the taverns. The Chinese are settled

as in China. The goods they offer for sale are as foreign as the

lettering on the signboard of the shop: dried fish from the China seas;

pale cakes and sweetmeats--the like, perhaps, once eaten by

Badroubadour; nuts of unfriendly shape; ambiguous, outlandish

vegetables, misshapen, lean, or bulbous--telling of a country where the

trees are not as our trees, and the very back-garden is a cabinet of

curiosities. The joss-house is hard by, heavy with incense, packed with

quaint carvings and the paraphernalia of a foreign ceremonial. All these

you behold, crowded together in the narrower arteries of the city, cool,

sunless, a little mouldy, with the unfamiliar faces at your elbow, and

the high, musical sing-song of that alien language in your ears. Yet the

houses are of Occidental build; the lines of a hundred telegraphs pass,

thick as a ship's rigging, overhead, a kite hanging among them, perhaps,

or perhaps two, one European, one Chinese, in shape and colour;

mercantile Jack, the Italian fisher, the Dutch merchant, the Mexican

vaquero, go hustling by; at the sunny end of the street, a thoroughfare

roars with European traffic; and meanwhile, high and clear, out breaks

perhaps the San Francisco fire-alarm, and people pause to count the

strokes, and in the stations of the double fire-service you know that

the electric bells are ringing, the traps opening, and clapping to, and

the engine, manned and harnessed, being whisked into the street, before

the sound of the alarm has ceased to vibrate on your ear. Of all

romantic places for a boy to loiter in, that Chinese quarter is the most

romantic. There, on a half-holiday, three doors from home, he may visit

an actual foreign land, foreign in people, language, things, and

customs. The very barber of the Arabian Nights shall be at work before

him, shaving heads; he shall see Aladdin playing on the streets; who

knows but among those nameless vegetables the fruit of the nose-tree

itself may be exposed for sale? And the interest is heightened with a

chill of horror. Below, you hear, the cellars are alive with mystery;

opium dens, where the smokers lie one above another, shelf above shelf,

close-packed and grovelling in deadly stupor; the seats of unknown vices

and cruelties, the prisons of unacknowledged slaves and the secret

lazarettos of disease.

With all this mass of nationalities, crime is common. There are rough

quarters where it is dangerous o' nights; cellars of public

entertainment which the wary pleasure-seeker chooses to avoid. Concealed

weapons are unlawful, but the law is continually broken. One editor was

shot dead while I was there; another walked the streets accompanied by a

bravo, his guardian angel. I have been quietly eating a dish of oysters

in a restaurant, where, not more than ten minutes after I had left,

shots were exchanged and took effect; and one night about ten o'clock, I

saw a man standing watchfully at a street-corner with a long

Smith-and-Wesson glittering in his hand behind his back. Somebody had

done something he should not, and was being looked for with a vengeance.

It is odd, too, that the seat of the last vigilance committee I know

of--a mediaeval _Vehmgericht_--was none other than the Palace Hotel, the

world's greatest caravanserai, served by lifts and lit with electricity;

where, in the great glazed court, a band nightly discourses music from a

grove of palms. So do extremes meet in this city of contrasts: extremes

of wealth and poverty, apathy and excitement, the conveniences of

civilisation and the red justice of Judge Lynch.

The streets lie straight up and down the hills, and straight across at

right angles, these in sun, those in shadow, a trenchant pattern of

gloom and glare; and what with the crisp illumination, the sea-air

singing in your ears, the chill and glitter, the changing aspects both

of things and people, the fresh sights at every corner of your

walk--sights of the bay, of Tamalpais, of steep, descending streets, of

the outspread city--whiffs of alien speech, sailors singing on

shipboard, Chinese coolies toiling on the shore, crowds brawling all day

in the street before the Stock Exchange--one brief impression follows

and obliterates another, and the city leaves upon the mind no general

and stable picture, but a profusion of airy and incongruous images, of

the sea and shore, the east and west, the summer and the winter.

In the better parts of the most interesting city there is apt to be a

touch of the commonplace. It is in the slums and suburbs that the city

dilettante finds his game. And there is nothing more characteristic and

original than the outlying quarters of San Francisco. The Chinese

district is the most famous; but it is far from the only truffle in the

pie. There is many another dingy corner, many a young antiquity, many a

_terrain vague_ with that stamp of quaintness that the city lover seeks

and dwells on; and the indefinite prolongation of its streets, up hill

and down dale, makes San Francisco a place apart. The same street in its

career visits and unites so many different classes of society, here

echoing with drays, there lying decorously silent between the mansions

of Bonanza millionaires, to founder at last among the drifting sands

beside Lone Mountain cemetery, or die out among the sheds and lumber of

the north. Thus you may be struck with a spot, set it down for the most

romantic of the city, and, glancing at the name-plate, find it is in the

same street that you yourself inhabit in another quarter of the town.

The great net of straight thoroughfares lying at right angles, east and

west and north and south, over the shoulders of Nob Hill, the hill of

palaces, must certainly be counted the best part of San Francisco. It is

there that the millionaires are gathered together vying with each other

in display. From thence, looking down over the business wards of the

city, we can descry a building with a little belfry, and that is the

Stock Exchange, the heart of San Francisco: a great pump we might call

it, continually pumping up the savings of the lower quarters into the

pockets of the millionaires upon the hill. But these same thoroughfares

that enjoy for awhile so elegant a destiny have their lines prolonged

into more unpleasant places. Some meet their fate in the sands; some

must take a cruise in the ill-famed China quarters; some run into the

sea; some perish unwept among pig-sties and rubbish-heaps.

Nob Hill comes, of right, in the place of honour; but the two other

hills of San Francisco are more entertaining to explore. On both there

are a world of old wooden houses snoozing together all forgotten. Some

are of the quaintest design, others only romantic by neglect and age.

Some have been almost undermined by new thoroughfares, and sit high up

on the margin of the sandy cutting, only to be reached by stairs. Some

are curiously painted, and I have seen one at least with ancient

carvings panelled in its wall. Surely they are not of Californian

building, but far voyagers from round the stormy Horn, like those who

sent for them and dwelt in them at first. Brought to be the favourites

of the wealthy, they have sunk into these poor, forgotten districts,

where, like old town toasts, they keep each other silently in

countenance. Telegraph Hill and Rincon Hill, these are the two dozing

quarters that I recommend to the city dilettante. There stand these

forgotten houses, enjoying the unbroken sun and quiet. There, if there

were such an author, would the San Francisco Fortune de Boisgobey pitch

the first chapter of his mystery. But the first is the quainter of the

two, and commands, moreover, a noble view. As it stands at the turn of

the bay, its skirts are all waterside, and round from North Reach to the

Bay Front you can follow doubtful paths from one quaint corner to

another. Everywhere the same tumble-down decay and sloppy progress, new

things yet unmade, old things tottering to their fall; everywhere the

same out-at-elbows, many-nationed loungers at dim, irregular grog-shops;

everywhere the same sea-air and isleted sea-prospect; and for a last and

more romantic note, you have on the one hand Tamalpais standing high in

the blue air, and on the other the tail of that long alignment of

three-masted, full-rigged, deep-sea ships that make a forest of spars

along the eastern front of San Francisco. In no other port is such a

navy congregated. For the coast trade is so trifling, and the ocean

trade from round the Horn so large, that the smaller ships are swallowed

up, and can do nothing to confuse the majestic order of these merchant

princes. In an age when the ship-of-the-line is already a thing of the

past, and we can never again hope to go coasting in a cock-boat between

the "wooden walls" of a squadron at anchor, there is perhaps no place on

earth where the power and beauty of sea architecture can be so perfectly

enjoyed as in this bay.

THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS

_Vixerunt nonnulli in agris, delectati re sua

familiari. His idem propositum fuit quod

regibus, ut ne qua re agerent, ne cui

parerent, libertate uterentur: cujus proprium

est sic vivere ut velis._

CIC. DE OFF. I. XX.

TO

VIRGIL WILLIAMS

AND

DORA NORTON WILLIAMS

THESE SKETCHES ARE AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED

BY THEIR FRIEND

THE AUTHOR

THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS

The scene of this little book is on a high mountain. There are, indeed,

many higher; there are many of a nobler outline. It is no place of

pilgrimage for the summary globe trotter; but to one who lives upon its

sides, Mount Saint Helena soon becomes a centre of interest. It is the

Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian Coast Range, none of its

near neighbours rising to one-half its altitude. It looks down on much

green, intricate country. It feeds in the spring-time many splashing

brooks. From its summit you must have an excellent lesson of geography:

seeing, to the south, San Francisco Bay, with Tamalpais on the one hand

and Monte Diablo on the other; to the west and thirty miles away, the

open ocean; eastward, across the cornlands and thick tule swamps of

Sacramento Valley, to where the Central Pacific Railroad begins to climb

the sides of the Sierras; and northward, for what I know, the white head

of Shasta looking down on Oregon. Three counties, Napa County, Lake

County, and Sonoma County, march across its cliffy shoulders. Its naked

peak stands nearly four thousand five hundred feet above the sea; its

sides are fringed with forest; and the soil, where it is bare, glows

warm with cinnabar.

Life in its shadow goes rustically forward. Bucks, and bears, and

rattlesnakes, and former mining operations, are the staple of men's

talk. Agriculture has only begun to mount above the valley. And though

in a few years from now the whole district may be smiling with farms,

passing trains shaking the mountain to the heart, many-windowed hotels

lighting up the night like factories, and a prosperous city occupying

the site of sleepy Calistoga; yet in the meantime, around the foot of

that mountain the silence of nature reigns in a great measure unbroken,

and the people of hill and valley go sauntering about their business as

in the days before the flood.

To reach Mount Saint Helena from San Francisco, the traveller has twice

to cross the bay: once by the busy Oakland Ferry, and again, after an

hour or so of the railway, from Vallejo Junction to Vallejo. Thence he

takes rail once more to mount the long green strath of Napa Valley.

In all the contractions and expansions of that inland sea, the Bay of

San Francisco, there can be few drearier scenes than the Vallejo Ferry.

Bald shores and a low, bald islet enclose the sea; through the narrows

the tide bubbles, muddy like a river. When we made the passage (bound,

although yet we knew it not, for Silverado) the steamer jumped, and the

black buoys were dancing in the jabble; the ocean breeze blew killing

chill; and, although the upper sky was still unflecked with vapour, the

sea-fogs were pouring in from seaward, over the hilltops of Marin

County, in one great, shapeless, silver cloud.

South Vallejo is typical of many Californian towns. It was a blunder;

the site has proved untenable; and although it is still such a young

place by the scale of Europe, it has already begun to be deserted for

its neighbour and namesake, North Vallejo. A long pier, a number of

drinking-saloons, a hotel of a great size, marshy pools where the frogs

keep up their croaking, and even at high noon the entire absence of any

human face or voice--these are the marks of South Vallejo. Yet there was

a tall building beside the pier, labelled the _Star Flour Mills_; and

sea-going, full-rigged ships lay close alongshore, waiting for their

cargo. Soon these would be plunging round the Horn, soon the flour from

the _Star Flour Mills_ would be landed on the wharves of Liverpool. For

that, too, is one of England's outposts; thither, to this gaunt mill,

across the Atlantic and Pacific deeps and round about the icy Horn,

this crowd of great, three-masted, deep-sea ships come, bringing

nothing, and return with bread.

The Frisby House, for that was the name of the hotel, was a place of

fallen fortunes, like the town. It was now given up to labourers, and

partly ruinous. At dinner there was the ordinary display of what is

called in the west a _two-bit house_: the tablecloth checked red and

white, the plague of flies, the wire hencoops over the dishes, the great

variety and invariable vileness of the food and the rough, coatless men

devouring it in silence. In our bedroom, the stove would not burn,

though it would smoke; and while one window would not open, the other

would not shut. There was a view on a bit of empty road, a few dark

houses, a donkey wandering with its shadow on a slope, and a blink of

sea, with a tall ship lying anchored in the moonlight. All about that

dreary inn frogs sang their ungainly chorus.

Early the next morning we mounted the hill along a wooden footway,

bridging one marish spot after another. Here and there, as we ascended,

we passed a house embowered in white roses. More of the bay became

apparent, and soon the blue peak of Tamalpais rose above the green level

of the island opposite. It told us we were still but a little way from

the city of the Golden Gates, already, at that hour, beginning to awake

among the sand-hills. It called to us over the waters as with the voice

of a bird. Its stately head, blue as a sapphire on the paler azure of

the sky, spoke to us of wider outlooks and the bright Pacific. For

Tamalpais stands sentry, like a lighthouse, over the Golden Gates,

between the bay and the open ocean, and looks down indifferently on

both. Even as we saw and hailed it from Vallejo, seamen, far out at sea,

were scanning it with shaded eyes; and, as if to answer to the thought,

one of the great ships below began silently to clothe herself with white

sails, homeward bound for England.

For some way beyond Vallejo the railway led us through bald green

pastures. On the west the rough highlands of Marin shut off the ocean;

in the midst, in long, straggling, gleaming arms, the bay died out among

the grass; there were few trees and few enclosures; the sun shone wide

over open uplands, the dis-plumed hills stood clear against the sky. But

by-and-by these hills began to draw nearer on either hand, and first

thicket and then wood began to clothe their sides; and soon we were away

from all signs of the sea's neighbourhood, mounting an inland, irrigated

valley. A great variety of oaks stood, now severally, now in a becoming

grove, among the fields and vineyards. The towns were compact, in about

equal proportions, of bright new wooden houses and great and growing

forest trees; and the chapel bell on the engine sounded most festally

that sunny Sunday, as we drew up at one green town after another, with

the townsfolk trooping in their Sunday's best to see the strangers, with

the sun sparkling on the clean houses, and great domes of foliage

humming overhead in the breeze.

This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end, blockaded by our

mountain. There, at Calistoga, the railroad ceases, and the traveller

who intends faring farther, to the Geysers or to the springs in Lake

County, must cross the spurs of the mountain by stage. Thus Mount Saint

Helena is not only a summit, but a frontier; and up to the time of

writing it has stayed the progress of the iron horse.

IN THE VALLEY

I

CALISTOGA

It is difficult for a European to imagine Calistoga, the whole place is

so new, and of such an Occidental pattern; the very name, I hear, was

invented at a supper-party by the man who found the springs.

The railroad and the highway come up the valley about parallel to one

another. The street of Calistoga joins them, perpendicular to both--a

wide street, with bright, clean, low houses, here and there a veranda

over the sidewalk, here and there a horse-post, here and there lounging

townsfolk. Other streets are marked out, and most likely named; for

these towns in the New World begin with a firm resolve to grow larger,

Washington and Broadway, and then First and Second, and so forth, being

boldly plotted out as soon as the community indulges in a plan. But, in

the meanwhile, all the life and most of the houses of Calistoga are

concentrated upon that street between the railway station and the road.

I never heard it called by any name, but I will hazard a guess that it

is either Washington or Broadway. Here are the blacksmith's, the

chemist's, the general merchant's, and Kong Sam Kee, the Chinese

laundryman's; here, probably, is the office of the local paper (for the

place has a paper--they all have papers); and here certainly is one of

the hotels, Cheeseborough's, whence the daring Foss, a man dear to

legend, starts his horses for the Geysers.

It must be remembered that we are here in a land of stage-drivers and

highwaymen; a land, in that sense, like England a hundred years ago. The

highway robber--road-agent, he is quaintly called--is still busy in

these parts. The fame of Vasquez is still young. Only a few years ago,

the Lakeport stage was robbed a mile or two from Calistoga. In 1879, the

dentist of Mendocino City, fifty miles away upon the coast, suddenly

threw off the garments of his trade, like Grindoff, in _The Miller and

his Men_, and flamed forth in his second dress as a captain of banditti.

A great robbery was followed by a long chase, a chase of days if not of

weeks, among the intricate hill-country; and the chase was followed by

much desultory fighting, in which several--and the dentist, I believe,

amongst the number--bit the dust. The grass was springing for the first

time, nourished upon their blood, when I arrived in Calistoga. I am

reminded of another highwayman of that same year. "He had been unwell,"

so ran his humorous defence, "and the doctor told him to take something,

so he took the express box."

The cultus of the stage-coachman always flourishes highest where there

are thieves on the road, and where the guard travels armed, and the

stage is not only a link between country and city, and the vehicle of

news, but has a faint warfaring aroma, like a man who should be brother

to a soldier. California boasts her famous stage-drivers, and among the

famous Foss is not forgotten. Along the unfenced, abominable mountain

roads, he launches his team with small regard to human life or the

doctrine of probabilities. Flinching travellers, who behold themselves

coasting eternity at every corner, look with natural admiration at their

driver's huge, impassive, fleshy countenance. He has the very face for

the driver in Sam Weller's anecdote, who upset the election party at the

required point. Wonderful tales are current of his readiness and skill.

One in particular, of how one of his horses fell at a ticklish passage

of the road, and how Foss let slip the reins, and, driving over the

fallen animal, arrived at the next stage with only three. This I relate

as I heard it, without guarantee.

I only saw Foss once, though, strange as it may sound, I have twice

talked with him. He lives out of Calistoga, at a ranche called

Fossville. One evening, after he was long gone home, I dropped into

Cheeseborough's, and was asked if I should like to speak with Mr. Foss.

Supposing that the interview was impossible, and that I was merely

called upon to subscribe the general sentiment, I boldly answered "Yes."

Next moment, I had one instrument at my ear, another at my mouth, and

found myself, with nothing in the world to say, conversing with a man

several miles off among desolate hills. Foss rapidly and somewhat

plaintively brought the conversation to an end; and he returned to his

night's grog at Fossville, while I strolled forth again on Calistoga

high street. But it was an odd thing that here, on what we are

accustomed to consider the very skirts of civilisation, I should have

used the telephone for the first time in my civilised career. So it goes

in these young countries; telephones, and telegraphs, and newspapers,

and advertisements running far ahead among the Indians and the grizzly

bears.

Alone, on the other side of the railway, stands the Springs Hotel, with

its attendant cottages. The floor of the valley is extremely level to

the very roots of the hills; only here and there a hillock, crowned with

pines, rises like the barrow of some chieftain famed in war; and right

against one of these hillocks is the Springs Hotel--is or was; for since

I was there the place has been destroyed by fire, and has risen again

from its ashes. A lawn runs about the house, and the lawn is in its turn

surrounded by a system of little five-roomed cottages, each with a

veranda and a weedy palm before the door. Some of the cottages are let

to residents, and these are wreathed in flowers. The rest are occupied

by ordinary visitors to the hotel; and a very pleasant way this is, by

which you have a little country cottage of your own, without domestic

burthens, and by the day or week.

The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena is full of sulphur and of

boiling springs. The Geysers are famous; they were the great health

resort of the Indians before the coming of the whites. Lake County is

dotted with spas; Hot Springs and White Sulphur Springs are the names of

two stations on the Napa Valley Railroad; and Calistoga itself seems to

repose on a mere film above a boiling, subterranean lake. At one end of

the hotel enclosure are the springs from which it takes its name, hot

enough to scald a child seriously while I was there. At the other end,

the tenant of a cottage sank a well, and there also the water came up

boiling. It keeps this end of the valley as warm as a toast. I have gone

across to the hotel a little after five in the morning, when a sea-fog

from the Pacific was hanging thick and grey, and dark and dirty

overhead, and found the thermometer had been up before me, and had

already climbed among the nineties; and in the stress of the day it was

sometimes too hot to move about.

But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on both sides,

Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell in; beautifully green, for it

was then that favoured moment in the Californian year, when the rains

are over and the dusty summer has not yet set in; often visited by fresh

airs, now from the mountain, now across Sonoma from the sea; very quiet,

very idle, very silent but for the breezes and the cattle bells afield.

And there was something satisfactory in the sight of that great mountain

that enclosed us to the north; whether it stood, robed in sunshine,

quaking to its topmost pinnacle with the heat and brightness of the day;

or whether it set itself to weaving vapours, wisp after wisp growing,

trembling, fleeting, and fading in the blue.

The tangled, woody, and almost trackless foothills that enclose the

valley, shutting it off from Sonoma on the west, and from Yolo on the

east--rough as they were in outline, dug out by winter streams, crowned

by cliffy bluffs and nodding pine-trees--were dwarfed into satellites by

the bulk and bearing of Mount Saint Helena. She over-towered them by

two-thirds of her own stature. She excelled them by the boldness of her

profile. Her great bald summit, clear of trees and pasture, a cairn of

quartz and cinnabar, rejected kinship with the dark and shaggy

wilderness of lesser hilltops.

II

THE PETRIFIED FOREST

We drove off from the Springs Hotel about three in the afternoon. The

sun warmed me to the heart. A broad, cool wind streamed pauselessly down

the valley, laden with perfume. Up at the top stood Mount Saint Helena,

a bulk of mountain, bare atop, with tree-fringed spurs, and radiating

warmth. Once we saw it framed in a grove of tall and exquisitely

graceful white oaks, in line and colour a finished composition. We

passed a cow stretched by the roadside, her bell slowly beating time to

the movement of her ruminating jaws, her big red face crawled over by

half a dozen flies, a monument of content.

A little farther, and we struck to the left up a mountain road, and for

two hours threaded one valley after another, green, tangled, full of

noble timber, giving us every now and again a sight of Mount Saint

Helena and the blue hilly distance, and crossed by many streams, through

which we splashed to the carriage-step. To the right or the left, there

was scarce any trace of man but the road we followed; I think we passed

but one ranchero's house in the whole distance, and that was closed and

smokeless. But we had the society of these bright streams--dazzlingly

clear, as is their wont, splashing from the wheels in diamonds, and

striking a lively coolness through the sunshine. And what with the

innumerable variety of greens, the masses of foliage tossing in the

breeze, the glimpses of distance, the descents into seemingly

impenetrable thickets, the continual dodging of the road, which made

haste to plunge again into the covert, we had a fine sense of woods,

and spring-time, and the open air.

Our driver gave me a lecture by the way on Californian trees--a thing I

was much in need of, having fallen among painters who know the name of

nothing, and Mexicans who know the name of nothing in English. He taught

me the madrona, the manzanita, the buckeye, the maple; he showed me the

crested mountain quail; he showed me where some young redwoods were

already spiring heavenwards from the ruins of the old; for in this

district all had already perished: redwoods and redskins, the two

noblest indigenous living things, alike condemned.

At length, in a lonely dell, we came on a huge wooden gate with a sign

upon it like an inn. "The Petrified Forest. Proprietor: C. Evans," ran

the legend. Within, on a knoll of sward, was the house of the

proprietor, and another smaller house hard by to serve as a museum,

where photographs and petrifactions were retailed. It was a pure little

isle of touristry among these solitary hills.

The proprietor was a brave old white-faced Swede. He had wandered this

way, Heaven knows how, and taken up his acres--I forget how many years

ago--all alone, bent double with sciatica, and with six bits in his

pocket and an axe upon his shoulder. Long, useless years of seafaring

had thus discharged him at the end, penniless and sick. Without doubt he

had tried his luck at the diggings, and got no good from that; without

doubt he had loved the bottle, and lived the life of Jack ashore. But at

the end of these adventures, here he came; and, the place hitting his

fancy, down he sat to make a new life of it, far from crimps and the

salt sea. And the very sight of his ranche had done him good. It was

"the handsomest spot in the Californy mountains." "Isn't it handsome,

now?" he said. Every penny he makes goes into that ranche to make it

handsomer. Then the climate, with the sea-breeze every afternoon in the

hottest summer weather, had gradually cured the sciatica; and his sister

and niece were now domesticated with him for company--or, rather, the

niece came only once in the two days, teaching music the meanwhile in

the valley. And then, for a last piece of luck, "the handsomest spot in

the Californy mountains" had produced a petrified forest, which Mr.

Evans now shows at the modest figure of half a dollar a head, or

two-thirds of his capital when he first came there with an axe and a

sciatica.

This tardy favourite of fortune--hobbling a little, I think, as if in

memory of the sciatica, but with not a trace that I can remember of the

sea--thoroughly ruralised from head to foot, proceeded to escort us up

the hill behind his house.

"Who first found the forest?" asked my wife.

"The first? I was that man," said he. "I was cleaning up the pasture for

my beasts, when I found _this_"--kicking a great redwood, seven feet in

diameter, that lay there on its side, hollow heart, clinging lumps of

bark, all changed into grey stone, with veins of quartz between what had

been the layers of the wood.

"Were you surprised?"

"Surprised? No! What would I be surprised about? What did I know about

petrifactions--following the sea? Petrifaction! There was no such word

in my language! I knew about putrefaction, though! I thought it was a

stone; so would you, if you was cleaning up pasture."

And now he had a theory of his own, which I did not quite grasp, except

that the trees had not "grewed" there. But he mentioned, with evident

pride, that he differed from all the scientific people who had visited

the spot; and he flung about such words as "tufa" and "silica" with

careless freedom.

When I mentioned I was from Scotland, "My old country," he said; "my old

country"--with a smiling look and a tone of real affection in his voice.

I was mightily surprised, for he was obviously Scandinavian, and begged

him to explain. It seemed he had learned his English and done nearly

all his sailing in Scottish ships. "Out of Glasgow," said he, "or

Greenock; but that's all the same--they all hail from Glasgow." And he

was so pleased with me for being a Scotsman, and his adopted compatriot,

that he made me a present of a very beautiful piece of petrifaction--I

believe the most beautiful and portable he had.

Here was a man, at least, who was a Swede, a Scot, and an American,

acknowledging some kind allegiance to three lands. Mr. Wallace's

Scoto-Circassian will not fail to come before the reader. I have myself

met and spoken with a Fifeshire German, whose combination of abominable

accents struck me dumb. But, indeed, I think we all belong to many

countries. And perhaps this habit of much travel, and the engendering of

scattered friendships, may prepare the euthanasia of ancient nations.

And the forest itself? Well, on a tangled, briery hillside--for the

pasture would bear a little further cleaning up, to my eyes--there lie

scattered thickly various lengths of petrified trunk, such as the one

already mentioned. It is very curious, of course, and ancient enough, if

that were all. Doubtless, the heart of the geologist beats quicker at

the sight; but, for my part, I was mightily unmoved. Sight-seeing is the

art of disappointment.

"There's nothing under heaven so blue,

That's fairly worth the travelling to."

But, fortunately, Heaven rewards us with many agreeable prospects and

adventures by the way; and sometimes, when we go out to see a petrified

forest, prepares a far more delightful curiosity in the form of Mr.

Evans, whom may all prosperity attend throughout a long and green old

age.

III

NAPA WINE

I was interested in Californian wine. Indeed, I am interested in all

wines, and have been all my life, from the raisin wine that a

school-fellow kept secreted in his playbox up to my last discovery,

those notable Valtellines that once shone upon the board of Caesar.

Some of us, kind old Pagans, watch with dread the shadows falling on the

age: how the unconquerable worm invades the sunny terraces of France,

and Bordeaux is no more, and the Rhone a mere Arabia Petraea. Chateau

Neuf is dead, and I have never tasted it; Hermitage--a hermitage indeed

from all life's sorrows--lies expiring by the river. And in the place of

these imperial elixirs, beautiful to every sense, gem-hued,

flower-scented, dream-compellers:--behold upon the quays at Cette the

chemicals arrayed; behold the analyst at Marseilles, raising hands in

obsecration, attesting god Lyaeus, and the vats staved in, and the

dishonest wines poured forth among the sea. It is not Pan only; Bacchus,

too, is dead.

If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white

dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent,

hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing reminiscences--for a

bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect--if

wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old Jack! Now we begin to have

compunctions, and look back at the brave bottles squandered upon

dinner-parties, where the guests drank grossly, discussing politics the

while, and even the schoolboy "took his whack," like liquorice water.

And at the same time, we look timidly forward, with a spark of hope, to

where the new lands, already weary of producing gold, begin to green

with vineyards. A nice point in human history falls to be decided by

Californian and Australian wines.

Wine in California is still in the experimental stage; and when you

taste a vintage, grave economical questions are involved. The beginning

of vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for the precious

metals: the wine-grower also "prospects." One corner of land after

another is tried with one kind of grape after another. This is a

failure; that is better; a third best. So, bit by bit, they grope about

for their Clos Vougeot and Lafitte. Those lodes and pockets of earth,

more precious than the precious ores, that yield inimitable fragrance

and soft fire; those virtuous Bonanzas, where the soil has sublimated

under sun and stars to something finer, and the wine is bottled poetry:

these still lie undiscovered; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them;

the miner chips the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses

undisturbed. But there they bide their hour, awaiting their Columbus;

and nature nurses and prepares them. The smack of Californian earth

shall linger on the palate of your grandson.

Meanwhile the wine is merely a good wine; the best that I have

tasted--better than a Beaujolais, and not unlike. But the trade is poor;

it lives from hand to mouth, putting its all into experiments, and

forced to sell its vintages. To find one properly matured, and bearing

its own name, is to be fortune's favourite.

Bearing its own name, I say, and dwell upon the inuendo.

"You want to know why Californian wine is not drunk in the States?" a

San Francisco wine merchant said to me, after he had shown me through

his premises. "Well, here's the reason."

And opening a large cupboard, fitted with many little drawers, he

proceeded to shower me all over with a great variety of gorgeously

tinted labels, blue, red, or yellow, stamped with crown or coronet, and

hailing from such a profusion of _clos_ and _chateaux_, that a single

department could scarce have furnished forth the names. But it was

strange that all looked unfamiliar.

"Chateau X----?" said I. "I never heard of that."

"I dare say not," said he. "I had been reading one of X----'s novels."

They were all castles in Spain! But that sure enough is the reason why

California wine is not drunk in the States.

Napa Valley has been long a seat of the wine-growing industry. It did

not here begin, as it does too often, in the low valley lands along the

river, but took at once to the rough foot-hills, where alone it can

expect to prosper. A basking inclination, and stones, to be a reservoir

of the day's heat, seem necessary to the soil for wine; the grossness of

the earth must be evaporated, its marrow daily melted and refined for

ages; until at length these clods that break below our footing, and to

the eye appear but common earth, are truly and to the perceiving mind, a

masterpiece of nature. The dust of Richebourg, which the wind carries

away, what an apotheosis of the dust! Not man himself can seem a

stranger child of that brown, friable powder, than the blood and sun in

that old flask behind the fagots.

A Californian vineyard, one of man's outposts in the wilderness, has

features of its own. There is nothing here to remind you of the Rhine or

Rhone, of the low _cote d'or_, or the infamous and scabby deserts of

Champagne; but all is green, solitary, covert. We visited two of them,

Mr. Schram's and Mr. M'Eckron's, sharing the same glen.

Some way down the valley below Calistoga, we turned sharply to the south

and plunged into the thick of the wood. A rude trail rapidly mounting; a

little stream tinkling by on the one hand, big enough perhaps after the

rains, but already yielding up its life; overhead and on all sides, a

bower of green and tangled thicket, still fragrant and still

flower-bespangled by the early season, where thimble-berry played the

part of our English hawthorn, and the buck-eyes were putting forth their

twisted horns of blossom; through all this, we struggled toughly

upwards, canted to and fro by the roughness of the trail, and

continually switched across the face by sprays of leaf or blossom. The

last is no great inconvenience at home; but here in California it is a

matter of some moment. For in all woods and by every wayside there

prospers an abominable shrub or weed, called poison oak, whose very

neighbourhood is venomous to some, and whose actual touch is avoided by

the most impervious.

The two houses, with their vineyards, stood each in a green niche of its

own in this steep and narrow forest dell. Though they were so near,

there was already a good difference in level; and Mr. M'Eckron's head

must be a long way under the feet of Mr. Schram. No more had been

cleared than was necessary for cultivation; close around each oasis ran

the tangled wood; the glen enfolds them; there they lie basking in sun

and silence, concealed from all but the clouds and the mountain birds.

Mr. M'Eckron's is a bachelor establishment; a little bit of a wooden

house, a small cellar hard by in the hillside, and a patch of vines

planted and tended single-handed by himself. He had but recently begun;

his vines were young, his business young also; but I thought he had the

look of a man who succeeds. He hailed from Greenock: he remembered his

father putting him inside Mons Meg, and that touched me home; and we

exchanged a word or two of Scotch, which pleased me more than you would

fancy.

Mr. Schram's, on the other hand, is the oldest vineyard in the valley,

eighteen years old, I think; yet he began a penniless barber, and even

after he had broken ground up here with his black malvoisies, continued

for long to tramp the valley with his razor. Now, his place is the

picture of prosperity: stuffed birds in the veranda, cellars far dug

into the hillside, and resting on pillars like a bandit's cave:--all

trimness, varnish, flowers, and sunshine, among the tangled wildwood.

Stout, smiling Mrs. Schram, who has been to Europe and apparently all

about the States for pleasure, entertaining Fanny in the veranda, while

I was tasting wines in the cellar. To Mr. Schram this was a solemn

office; his serious gusto warmed my heart; prosperity had not yet wholly

banished a certain neophite and girlish trepidation, and he followed

every sip and read my face with proud anxiety. I tasted all. I tasted

every variety and shade of Schramberger, red and white Schramberger,

Burgundy Schramberger, Schramberger Hock, Schramberger Golden Chasselas,

the latter with a notable bouquet, and I fear to think how many more.

Much of it goes to London--most, I think; and Mr. Schram has a great

notion of the English taste.

In this wild spot, I did not feel the sacredness of ancient cultivation.

It was still raw, it was no Marathon, and no Johannisberg; yet the

stirring sunlight, and the growing vines, and the vats and bottles in

the cavern, made a pleasant music for the mind. Here, also, earth's

cream was being skimmed and garnered; and the London customers can

taste, such as it is, the tang of the earth in this green valley. So

local, so quintessential is a wine, that it seems the very birds in the

veranda might communicate a flavour, and that romantic cellar influence

the bottle next to be uncorked in Pimlico, and the smile of jolly Mr.

Schram might mantle in the glass.

But these are but experiments. All things in this new land are moving

farther on: the wine-vats and the miner's blasting tools but picket for

a night, like Bedouin pavilions; and to-morrow, to fresh woods! This

stir of change and these perpetual echoes of the moving footfall, haunt

the land. Men move eternally, still chasing Fortune; and, fortune found,

still wander. As we drove back to Calistoga, the road lay empty of mere

passengers, but its green side was dotted with the camps of travelling

families: one cumbered with a great waggonful of household stuff,

settlers going to occupy a ranche they had taken up in Mendocino, or

perhaps Tehama County; another, a party in dust-coats, men and women,

whom we found camped in a grove on the roadside, all on pleasure bent,

with a Chinaman to cook for them, and who waved their hands to us as we

drove by.

IV

THE SCOT ABROAD

A few pages back, I wrote that a man belonged in these days to a variety

of countries; but the old land is still the true love, the others are

but pleasant infidelities. Scotland is indefinable; it has no unity

except upon the map. Two languages, many dialects, innumerable forms of

piety, and countless local patriotisms and prejudices, part us among

ourselves more widely than the extreme east and west of that great

continent of America. When I am at home, I feel a man from Glasgow to be

something like a rival, a man from Barra to be more than half a

foreigner. Yet let us meet in some far country, and, whether we hail

from the braes of Manor or the braes of Mar, some ready-made affection

joins us on the instant. It is not race. Look at us. One is Norse, one

Celtic, and another Saxon. It is not community of tongue. We have it not

among ourselves; and we have it almost to perfection, with English, or

Irish, or American. It is no tie of faith, for we detest each other's

errors. And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each one of us,

something yearns for the old land, and the old kindly people.

Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most

inscrutable. There is no special loveliness in that grey country, with

its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its

unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly-looking

corn-lands; its quaint, grey, castled city, where the bells clash of a

Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat. I do

not even know if I desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far

land, a kindred voice sing out, "Oh, why left I my hame?" and it seems at

once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise

and good, can repay me for my absence from my country. And though I think

I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be

buried among good Scots clods. I will say it fairly, it grows on me with

every year: there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street-lamps. When

I forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cunning!

The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman. You must pay for it

in many ways, as for all other advantages on earth. You have to learn

the paraphrases and the shorter catechism; you generally take to drink;

your youth, as far as I can find out, is a time of louder war against

society, of more outcry and tears and turmoil, than if you had been

born, for instance, in England. But somehow life is warmer and closer;

the hearth burns more redly; the lights of home shine softer on the

rainy street; the very names, endeared in verse and music, cling nearer

round our hearts. An Englishman may meet an Englishman to-morrow, upon

Chimborazo, and neither of them care; but when the Scotch wine-grower

told me of Mons Meg, it was like magic.

"From the dim shieling on the misty island

Mountains divide us, and a world of seas;

Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,

And we, in dreams, behold the Hebrides."

And, Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scottish.

Only a few days after I had seen M'Eckron, a message reached me in my

cottage. It was a Scotchman who had come down a long way from the hills

to market. He had heard there was a countryman in Calistoga, and came

round to the hotel to see him. We said a few words to each other; we had

not much to say--should never have seen each other had we stayed at

home, separated alike in space and in society; and then we shook hands,

and he went his way again to his ranche among the hills, and that was

all.

Another Scotchman there was, a resident, who for the mere love of the

common country, douce, serious, religious man, drove me all about the

valley, and took as much interest in me as if I had been his son: more,

perhaps; for the son has faults too keenly felt, while the abstract

countryman is perfect--like a whiff of peats.

And there was yet another. Upon him I came suddenly, as he was calmly

entering my cottage, his mind quite evidently bent on plunder: a man of

about fifty, filthy, ragged, roguish, with a chimney-pot hat and a tail

coat, and a pursing of his mouth that might have been envied by an elder

of the kirk. He had just such a face as I have seen a dozen times behind

the plate.

"Hullo, sir!" I cried. "Where are you going?"

He turned round without a quiver.

"You are a Scotchman, sir?" he said gravely. "So am I; I come from

Aberdeen. This is my card," presenting me with a piece of pasteboard

which he had raked out of some gutter in the period of the rains. "I was

just examining this palm," he continued, indicating the misbegotten

plant before our door, "which is the largest specimen I have yet

observed in Califoarnia."

There were four or five larger within sight. But where was the use of

argument? He produced a tape-line, made me help him to measure the tree

at the level of the ground, and entered the figures in a large and

filthy pocket-book, all with the gravity of Solomon. He then thanked me

profusely, remarking that such little services were due between

countrymen; shook hands with me, "for auld lang syne," as he said; and

took himself solemnly away, radiating dirt and humbug as he went.

A month or two after this encounter of mine, there came a Scot to

Sacramento--perhaps from Aberdeen. Anyway, there never was anyone more

Scottish in this wide world. He could sing and dance and drink, I

presume; and he played the pipes with vigour and success. All the Scotch

in Sacramento became infatuated with him, and spent their spare time and

money driving him about in an open cab, between drinks, while he blew

himself scarlet at the pipes. This is a very sad story. After he had

borrowed money from every one, he and his pipes suddenly disappeared

from Sacramento, and when I last heard, the police were looking for him.

I cannot say how this story amused me, when I felt myself so thoroughly

ripe on both sides to be duped in the same way.

It is at least a curious thing, to conclude, that the races which wander

widest, Jews and Scots, should be the most clannish in the world. But

perhaps these two are cause and effect: "For ye were strangers in the

land of Egypt."

WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL

I

TO INTRODUCE MR. KELMAR

One thing in this new country very particularly strikes a stranger, and

that is the number of antiquities. Already there have been many cycles

of population succeeding each other, and passing away and leaving behind

them relics. These, standing on into changed times, strike the

imagination as forcibly as any pyramid or feudal tower. The towns, like

the vineyards, are experimentally founded: they grow great and prosper

by passing occasions; and when the lode comes to an end, and the miners

move elsewhere, the town remains behind them, like Palmyra in the

desert. I suppose there are, in no country in the world, so many

deserted towns as here in California.

The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena, now so quiet and sylvan,

was once alive with mining camps and villages. Here there would be two

thousand souls under canvas; there one thousand or fifteen hundred

ensconced, as if for ever, in a town of comfortable houses. But the luck

had failed, the mines petered out; and the army of miners had departed,

and left this quarter of the world to the rattlesnakes and deer and

grizzlies, and to the slower but steadier advance of husbandry.

It was with an eye on one of these deserted places, Pine Flat, on the

Geysers road, that we had come first to Calistoga. There is something

singularly enticing in the idea of going, rent free, into a ready-made

house. And to the British merchant, sitting at home at ease, it may

appear that, with such a roof over your head and a spring of clear water

hard by, the whole problem of the squatter's existence would be solved.

Food, however, has yet to be considered. I will go as far as most people

on tinned meats; some of the brightest moments of my life were passed

over tinned mulligatawny in the cabin of a sixteen-ton schooner,

storm-stayed in Portree Bay; but after suitable experiments, I pronounce

authoritatively that man cannot live by tins alone. Fresh meat must be

had on an occasion. It is true that the great Foss, driving by along the

Geysers road, wooden-faced, but glorified with legend, might have been

induced to bring us meat, but the great Foss could hardly bring us milk.

To take a cow would have involved taking a field of grass and a

milkmaid; after which it would have been hardly worth while to pause,

and we might have added to our colony a flock of sheep and an

experienced butcher.

It is really very disheartening how we depend on other people in this

life. _Mihi est propositum_, as you may see by the motto, _idem quod

regibus_; and behold it cannot be carried out, unless I find a neighbour

rolling in cattle.

Now, my principal adviser in this matter was one whom I will call

Kelmar. That was not what he called himself, but as soon as I set eyes

on him, I knew it was or ought to be his name; I am sure it will be his

name among the angels. Kelmar was the store-keeper, a Russian Jew,

good-natured, in a very thriving way of business, and, on equal terms,

one of the most serviceable of men. He also had something of the

expression of a Scottish country elder, who, by some peculiarity, should

chance to be a Hebrew. He had a projecting under lip, with which he

continually smiled, or rather smirked. Mrs. Kelmar was a singularly kind

woman; and the oldest son had quite a dark and romantic bearing, and

might be heard on summer evenings playing sentimental airs on the

violin.

I had no idea, at the time I made his acquaintance, what an important

person Kelmar was. But the Jew store-keepers of California, profiting at

once by the needs and habits of the people, have made themselves in too

many cases the tyrants of the rural population. Credit is offered, is

pressed on the new customer, and when once he is beyond his depth, the

tune changes, and he is from thenceforth a white slave. I believe, even

from the little I saw, that Kelmar, if he chose to put on the screw,

could send half the settlers packing in a radius of seven or eight miles

round Calistoga. These are continually paying him, but are never

suffered to get out of debt. He palms dull goods upon them, for they

dare not refuse to buy; he goes and dines with them when he is on an

outing, and no man is loudlier welcomed; he is their family friend, the

director of their business, and, to a degree elsewhere unknown in modern

days, their king.

For some reason, Kelmar always shook his head at the mention of Pine

Flat, and for some days I thought he disapproved of the whole scheme and

was proportionately sad. One fine morning, however, he met me, wreathed

in smiles. He had found the very place for me--Silverado, another old

mining town, right up the mountain. Rufe Hanson, the hunter, could take

care of us--fine people the Hansons; we should be close to the Toll

House, where the Lakeport stage called daily; it was the best place for

my health, besides. Rufe had been consumptive, and was now quite a

strong man, ain't it? In short, the place and all its accompaniments

seemed made for us on purpose.

He took me to his back door, whence, as from every point of Calistoga,

Mount Saint Helena could be seen towering in the air. There, in the

nick, just where the eastern foot-hills joined the mountain, and she

herself began to rise above the zone of forest--there was Silverado. The

name had already pleased me; the high station pleased me still more. I

began to inquire with some eagerness. It was but a little while ago that

Silverado was a great place. The mine--a silver mine, of course--had

promised great things. There was quite a lively population, with

several hotels and boarding-houses; and Kelmar himself had opened a

branch store, and done extremely well--"Ain't it?" he said, appealing to

his wife. And she said, "Yes; extremely well." Now there was no one

living in the town but Rufe the hunter; and once more I heard Rufe's

praises by the yard, and this time sung in chorus.

I could not help perceiving at the time that there was something

underneath; that no unmixed desire to have us comfortably settled had

inspired the Kelmars with this flow of words. But I was impatient to be

gone, to be about my kingly project; and when we were offered seats in

Kelmar's waggon, I accepted on the spot. The plan of their next Sunday's

outing took them, by good fortune, over the border into Lake County.

They would carry us so far, drop us at the Toll House, present us to the

Hansons, and call for us again on Monday morning early.

II

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SILVERADO

We were to leave by six precisely; that was solemnly pledged on both

sides; and a messenger came to us the last thing at night, to remind us

of the hour. But it was eight before we got clear of Calistoga: Kelmar,

Mrs. Kelmar, a friend of theirs whom we named Abramina, her little

daughter, my wife, myself, and, stowed away behind us, a cluster of

ship's coffee-kettles. These last were highly ornamental in the sheen of

their bright tin, but I could invent no reason for their presence. Our

carriageful reckoned up, as near as we could get at it, some three

hundred years to the six of us. Four of the six, besides, were Hebrews.

But I never, in all my life, was conscious of so strong an atmosphere of

holiday. No word was spoken but of pleasure; and even when we drove in

silence, nods and smiles went round the party like refreshments.

The sun shone out of a cloudless sky. Close at the zenith rode the

belated moon, still clearly visible, and, along one margin, even bright.

The wind blew a gale from the north; the trees roared; the corn and the

deep grass in the valley fled in whitening surges; the dust towered into

the air along the road and dispersed like the smoke of battle. It was

clear in our teeth from the first, and for all the windings of the road

it managed to keep clear in our teeth until the end.

For some two miles we rattled through the valley, skirting the eastern

foot-hills; then we struck off to the right, through haugh-land, and

presently, crossing a dry watercourse, entered the Toll road, or, to be

more local, entered on "the grade." The road mounts the near shoulder of

Mount Saint Helena, bound northward into Lake County. In one place it

skirts along the edge of a narrow and deep canyon, filled with trees, and

I was glad, indeed, not to be driven at this point by the dashing Foss.

Kelmar, with his unvarying smile, jogging to the motion of the trap,

drove for all the world like a good, plain, country clergyman at home;

and I profess I blessed him unawares for his timidity.

Vineyards and deep meadows, islanded and framed with thicket, gave place

more and more as we ascended to woods of oak and madrona, dotted with

enormous pines. It was these pines, as they shot above the lower wood,

that produced that pencilling of single trees I had so often remarked

from the valley. Thence, looking up and from however far, each fir

stands separate against the sky no bigger than an eyelash; and all

together lend a quaint, fringed aspect to the hills. The oak is no baby;

even the madrona, upon these spurs of Mount Saint Helena, comes to a

fine bulk and ranks with forest trees; but the pines look down upon the

rest for underwood. As Mount Saint Helena among her foot-hills, so these

dark giants out-top their fellow-vegetables. Alas! if they had left the

redwoods, the pines, in turn, would have been dwarfed. But the redwoods,

fallen from their high estate, are serving as family bedsteads, or yet

more humbly as field fences, along all Napa Valley.

A rough smack of resin was in the air, and a crystal mountain purity. It

came pouring over these green slopes by the oceanful. The woods sang

aloud, and gave largely of their healthful breath. Gladness seemed to

inhabit these upper zones, and we had left indifference behind us in the

valley. "I to the hills will lift mine eyes!" There are days in a life

when thus to climb out of the lowlands seems like scaling heaven.

As we continued to ascend, the wind fell upon us with increasing

strength. It was a wonder how the two stout horses managed to pull us up

that steep incline and still face the athletic opposition of the wind,

or how their great eyes were able to endure the dust. Ten minutes after

we went by, a tree fell, blocking the road; and even before us leaves

were thickly strewn, and boughs had fallen, large enough to make the

passage difficult. But now we were hard by the summit. The road crosses

the ridge, just in the nick that Kelmar showed me from below, and then,

without pause, plunges down a deep, thickly wooded glen on the farther

side. At the highest point a trail strikes up the main hill to the

leftward; and that leads to Silverado. A hundred yards beyond, and in a

kind of elbow of the glen, stands the Toll House Hotel. We came up the

one side, were caught upon the summit by the whole weight of the wind as

it poured over into Napa Valley, and a minute after had drawn up in

shelter, but all buffeted and breathless, at the Toll House door.

A water-tank, and stables, and a grey house of two stories, with gable

ends and a veranda, are jammed hard against the hillside, just where a

stream has cut for itself a narrow canyon, filled with pines. The pines

go right up overhead; a little more and the stream might have played,

like a fire-hose, on the Toll House roof. In front the ground drops as

sharply as it rises behind. There is just room for the road and a sort

of promontory of croquet ground, and then you can lean over the edge and

look deep below you through the wood. I said croquet _ground_, not

_green_; for the surface was of brown, beaten earth. The toll-bar itself

was the only other note of originality: a long beam, turning on a post,

and kept slightly horizontal by a counterweight of stones. Regularly

about sundown this rude barrier was swung, like a derrick, across the

road and made fast, I think, to a tree upon the farther side.

On our arrival there followed a gay scene in the bar. I was presented to

Mr. Corwin, the landlord; to Mr. Jennings, the engineer, who lives

there for his health; to Mr. Hoddy, a most pleasant little gentleman,

once a member of the Ohio legislature, again the editor of a local

paper, and now, with undiminished dignity, keeping the Toll House bar. I

had a number of drinks and cigars bestowed on me, and enjoyed a famous

opportunity of seeing Kelmar in his glory, friendly, radiant, smiling,

steadily edging one of the ship's kettles on the reluctant Corwin.

Corwin, plainly aghast, resisted gallantly, and for that bout victory

crowned his arms.

At last we set forward for Silverado on foot. Kelmar and his jolly Jew

girls were full of the sentiment of Sunday outings, breathed geniality

and vagueness, and suffered a little vile boy from the hotel to lead

them here and there about the woods. For three people all so old, so

bulky in body, and belonging to a race so venerable, they could not but

surprise us by their extreme and almost imbecile youthfulness of spirit.

They were only going to stay ten minutes at the Toll House; had they not

twenty long miles of road before them on the other side? Stay to dinner?

Not they! Put up the horses? Never. Let us attach them to the veranda by

a wisp of straw rope, such as would not have held a person's hat on that

blustering day. And with all these protestations of hurry, they proved

irresponsible like children. Kelmar himself, shrewd old Russian Jew,

with a smirk that seemed just to have concluded a bargain to its

satisfaction, intrusted himself and us devoutly to that boy. Yet the boy

was patently fallacious; and for that matter a most unsympathetic

urchin, raised apparently on gingerbread. He was bent on his own

pleasure, nothing else; and Kelmar followed him to his ruin, with the

same shrewd smirk. If the boy said there was "a hole there in the

hill"--a hole, pure and simple, neither more nor less--Kelmar and his

Jew girls would follow him a hundred yards to look complacently down

that hole. For two hours we looked for houses; and for two hours they

followed us, smelling trees, picking flowers, foisting false botany on

the unwary. Had we taken five, with that vile lad to head them off on

idle divagations, for five they would have smiled and stumbled through

the woods.

However, we came forth at length, and as by accident, upon a lawn,

sparse planted like an orchard, but with forest instead of fruit trees.

That was the site of Silverado mining town. A piece of ground was

levelled up, where Kelmar's store had been; and facing that we saw Rufe

Hanson's house, still bearing on its front the legend _Silverado Hotel_.

Not another sign of habitation. Silverado town had all been carted from

the scene; one of the houses was now the schoolhouse far down the road;

one was gone here, one there, but all were gone away. It was now a

sylvan solitude, and the silence was unbroken but by the great, vague

voice of the wind. Some days before our visit, a grizzly bear had been

sporting round the Hansons' chicken-house.

Mrs. Hanson was at home, alone, we found. Rufe had been out after a

"bar," had risen late, and was now gone, it did not clearly appear

whither. Perhaps he had had wind of Kelmar's coming, and was now

ensconced among the underwood, or watching us from the shoulder of the

mountain. We, hearing there were no houses to be had, were for

immediately giving up all hopes of Silverado. But this, somehow, was not

to Kelmar's fancy. He first proposed that we should "camp someveres

around, ain't it?" waving his hand cheerily as though to weave a spell;

and when that was firmly rejected, he decided that we must take up house

with the Hansons. Mrs. Hanson had been, from the first, flustered,

subdued, and a little pale; but from this proposition she recoiled with

haggard indignation. So did we, who would have preferred, in a manner of

speaking, death. But Kelmar was not to be put by. He edged Mrs. Hanson

into a corner, where for a long time he threatened her with his

forefinger, like a character in Dickens; and the poor woman, driven to

her entrenchments, at last remembered with a shriek that there were

still some houses at the tunnel.

Thither we went; the Jews, who should already have been miles into Lake

County, still cheerily accompanying us. For about a furlong we followed

a good road along the hillside through the forest, until suddenly that

road widened out and came abruptly to an end. A canyon, woody below, red,

rocky, and naked overhead, was here walled across by a dump of rolling

stones, dangerously steep, and from twenty to thirty feet in height. A

rusty iron chute on wooden legs came flying, like a monstrous gargoyle,

across the parapet. It was down this that they poured the precious ore;

and below here the carts stood to wait their lading, and carry it

millward down the mountain.

The whole canyon was so entirely blocked, as if by some rude guerilla

fortification, that we could only mount by lengths of wooden ladder,

fixed in the hillside. These led us round the farther corner of the

dump; and when they were at an end, we still persevered over loose

rubble and wading deep in poison oak, till we struck a triangular

platform, filling up the whole glen, and shut in on either hand by bold

projections of the mountain. Only in front the place was open like the

proscenium of a theatre, and we looked forth into a great realm of air,

and down upon treetops and hilltops, and far and near on wild and varied

country. The place still stood as on the day it was deserted: a line of

iron rails with a bifurcation; a truck in working order; a world of

lumber, old wood, old iron, a blacksmith's forge on one side, half

buried in the leaves of dwarf madronas; and on the other, an old brown

wooden house.

Fanny and I dashed at the house. It consisted of three rooms, and was so

plastered against the hill, that one room was right atop of another,

that the upper floor was more than twice as large as the lower, and that

all three apartments must be entered from a different side or level. Not

a window-sash remained. The door of the lower room was smashed, and one

panel hung in splinters. We entered that, and found a fair amount of

rubbish: sand and gravel that had been sifted in there by the mountain

winds; straws, sticks, and stones; a table, a barrel; a plate-rack on

the wall; two home-made boot-jacks, signs of miners and their boots; and

a pair of papers pinned on the boarding, headed respectively "Funnel No.

1," and "Funnel No. 2," but with the tails torn away. The window,

sashless of course, was choked with the green and sweetly smelling

foliage of a bay; and through a chink in the floor, a spray of poison

oak had shot up and was handsomely prospering in the interior. It was my

first care to cut away that poison oak, Fanny standing by at a

respectful distance. That was our first improvement by which we took

possession.

The room immediately above could only be entered by a plank propped

against the threshold, along which the intruder must foot it gingerly,

clutching for support to sprays of poison oak, the proper product of the

country. Herein was, on either hand, a triple tier of beds, where miners

had once lain; and the other gable was pierced by a sashless window and

a doorless doorway opening on the air of heaven, five feet above the

ground. As for the third room, which entered squarely from the ground

level, but higher up the hill and farther up the canyon, it contained

only rubbish and the uprights for another triple tier of beds.

The whole building was overhung by a bold, lion-like, red rock. Poison

oak, sweet bay trees, calycanthus, brush, and chaparral, grew freely but

sparsely all about it. In front, in the strong sunshine, the platform

lay overstrewn with busy litter, as though the labours of the mine might

begin again to-morrow in the morning.

Following back into the canyon, among the mass of rotting plant and

through the flowering bushes, we came to a great crazy staging, with a

wry windlass on the top; and clambering up, we could look into an open

shaft, leading edgeways down into the bowels of the mountain, trickling

with water, and lit by some stray sun-gleams, whence I know not. In that

quiet place the still, far-away tinkle of the water-drops was loudly

audible. Close by, another shaft led edgeways up into the superincumbent

shoulder of the hill. It lay partly open; and sixty or a hundred feet

above our head, we could see the strata propped apart by solid wooden

wedges, and a pine, half-undermined, precariously nodding on the verge.

Here also a rugged, horizontal tunnel ran straight into the unsunned

bowels of the rock. This secure angle in the mountain's flank was, even

on this wild day, as still as my lady's chamber. But in the tunnel a

cold, wet draught tempestuously blew. Nor have I ever known that place

otherwise than cold and windy.

Such was our first prospect of Juan Silverado. I own I had looked for

something different: a clique of neighbourly houses on a village green,

we shall say, all empty to be sure, but swept and varnished; a trout

stream brawling by; great elms or chestnuts, humming with bees and

nested in by song-birds; and the mountains standing round about, as at

Jerusalem. Here, mountain and house and the old tools of industry were

all alike, rusty and down-falling. The hill was here wedged up, and

there poured forth its bowels in a spout of broken mineral; man with his

picks and powder, and nature with her own great blasting tools of sun

and rain, labouring together at the ruin of that proud mountain. The

view up the canyon was a glimpse of devastation; dry red minerals sliding

together, here and there a crag, here and there dwarf thicket clinging

in the general glissade, and over all a broken outline trenching on the

blue of heaven. Downwards indeed, from our rock eyrie, we beheld the

greener side of nature; and the bearing of the pine and the sweet smell

of bays and nutmegs commended themselves gratefully to our senses. One

way and another, now the die was cast. Silverado be it!

After we had got back to the Toll House, the Jews were not long of

striking forward. But I observed that one of the Hanson lads came down,

before their departure, and returned with a ship's kettle. Happy

Hansons! Nor was it until after Kelmar was gone, if I remember rightly,

that Rufe put in an appearance to arrange the details of our

installation.

The latter part of the day, Fanny and I sat in the veranda of the Toll

House, utterly stunned by the uproar of the wind among the trees on the

other side of the valley. Sometimes, we would have it it was like a sea,

but it was not various enough for that; and again, we thought it like

the roar of a cataract, but it was too changeful for the cataract; and

then we would decide, speaking in sleepy voices, that it could be

compared with nothing but itself. My mind was entirely preoccupied by

the noise. I hearkened to it by the hour, gapingly hearkened, and let my

cigarette go out. Sometimes the wind would make a sally nearer hand, and

send a shrill, whistling crash among the foliage on our side of the

glen; and sometimes a back-draught would strike into the elbow where we

sat, and cast the gravel and torn leaves into our faces. But for the

most part, this great, streaming gale passed unweariedly by us into Napa

Valley, not two hundred yards away visible by the tossing boughs,

stunningly audible, and yet not moving a hair upon our heads. So it blew

all night long while I was writing up my journal, and after we were in

bed, under a cloudless, starset heaven; and so it was blowing still next

morning when we rose.

It was a laughable thought to us, what had become of our cheerful

wandering Hebrews. We could not suppose they had reached a destination.

The meanest boy could lead them miles out of their way to see a

gopher-hole. Boys we felt to be their special danger; none others were

of that exact pitch of cheerful irrelevancy to exercise a kindred sway

upon their minds: but before the attractions of a boy their most

settled resolutions would be wax. We thought we could follow in fancy

these three aged Hebrew truants wandering in and out on hilltop and in

thicket, a demon boy trotting far ahead, their will-o'-the-wisp

conductor; and at last about midnight, the wind still roaring in the

darkness, we had a vision of all three on their knees upon a

mountain-top around a glow-worm.

III

THE RETURN

Next morning we were up by half-past five, according to agreement, and

it was ten by the clock before our Jew boys returned to pick us up:

Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, and Abramina, all smiling from ear to ear, and full

of tales of the hospitality they had found on the other side. It had not

gone unrewarded; for I observed with interest that the ship's kettles,

all but one, had been "placed." Three Lake County families, at least,

endowed for life with a ship's kettle. Come, this was no misspent

Sunday. The absence of the kettles told its own story: our Jews said

nothing about them; but, on the other hand, they said many kind and

comely things about the people they had met. The two women, in

particular, had been charmed out of themselves by the sight of a young

girl surrounded by her admirers; all evening, it appeared, they had been

triumphing together in the girl's innocent successes, and to this

natural and unselfish joy they gave expression in language that was

beautiful by its simplicity and truth.

Take them for all in all, few people have done my heart more good; they

seem so thoroughly entitled to happiness, and to enjoy it in so large a

measure and so free from after-thought; almost they persuaded me to be a

Jew. There was, indeed, a chink of money in their talk. They

particularly commended people who were well to do. "_He_ don't

care--ain't it?" was their highest word of commendation to an individual

fate; and here I seem to grasp the root of their philosophy--it was to

be free from care, to be free to make these Sunday wanderings, that

they so eagerly pursued after wealth; and all this carefulness was to be

careless. The fine good-humour of all three seemed to declare they had

attained their end. Yet there was the other side to it; and the

recipients of kettles perhaps cared greatly.

No sooner had they returned, than the scene of yesterday began again.

The horses were not even tied with a straw rope this time--it was not

worth while; and Kelmar disappeared into the bar, leaving them under a

tree on the other side of the road. I had to devote myself. I stood

under the shadow of that tree for, I suppose, hard upon an hour, and had

not the heart to be angry. Once some one remembered me, and brought me

out a half a tumblerful of the playful, innocuous American cocktail. I

drank it, and lo! veins of living fire ran down my leg; and then a focus

of conflagration remained seated in my stomach, not unpleasantly, for a

quarter of an hour. I love these sweet, fiery pangs, but I will not

court them. The bulk of the time I spent in repeating as much French

poetry as I could remember to the horses, who seemed to enjoy it hugely.

And now it went--

"O ma vieille Font-georges

Ou volent les rouges-gorges":

and again, to a more trampling measure:--

"Et tout tremble, Irun, Coimbre,

Santander, Almodovar,

Sitot qu'on entend le timbre

Des cymbales de Bivar."

The redbreasts and the brooks of Europe, in that dry and songless land;

brave old names and wars, strong cities, cymbals, and bright armour, in

that nook of the mountain, sacred only to the Indian and the bear! This

is still the strangest thing in all man's travelling, that he should

carry about with him incongruous memories. There is no foreign land; it

is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of

recollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth.

But while I was thus wandering in my fancy, great feats had been

transacted in the bar. Corwin the bold had fallen, Kelmar was again

crowned with laurels, and the last of the ship's kettles had changed

hands. If I had ever doubted the purity of Kelmar's motives, if I had

ever suspected him of a single eye to business in his eternal dallyings,

now at least, when the last kettle was disposed of, my suspicions must

have been allayed. I dare not guess how much more time was wasted; nor

how often we drove off merely to drive back again and renew interrupted

conversations about nothing, before the Toll House was fairly left

behind. Alas! and not a mile down the grade there stands a ranche in a

sunny vineyard, and here we must all dismount again and enter.

Only the old lady was at home, Mrs. Guele, a brown old Swiss dame, the

picture of honesty; and with her we drank a bottle of wine and had an

age-long conversation, which would have been highly delightful if Fanny

and I had not been faint with hunger. The ladies each narrated the story

of her marriage, our two Hebrews with the prettiest combination of

sentiment and financial bathos. Abramina, specially, endeared herself

with every word. She was as simple, natural, and engaging as a kid that

should have been brought up to the business of a money-changer. One

touch was so resplendently Hebraic that I cannot pass it over. When her

"old man" wrote home for her from America, her old man's family would

not entrust her with the money for the passage, till she had bound

herself by an oath--on her knees, I think she said--not to employ it

otherwise. This had tickled Abramina hugely, but I think it tickled me

fully more.

Mrs. Guele told of her homesickness up here in the long winters; of her

honest, country-woman troubles and alarms upon the journey; how in the

bank at Frankfort she had feared lest the banker, after having taken her

cheque, should deny all knowledge of it--a fear I have myself every

time I go to a bank; and how crossing the Lueneburger Heath, an old lady

witnessing her trouble and finding whither she was bound, had given her

"the blessing of a person eighty years old, which would be sure to bring

her safely to the States. And the first thing I did," added Mrs. Guele,

"was to fall down-stairs."

At length we got out of the house, and some of us into the trap,

when--judgment of Heaven!--here came Mr. Guele from his vineyard. So

another quarter of an hour went by; till at length, at our earnest

pleading, we set forth again in earnest, Fanny and I white-faced and

silent but the Jews still smiling. The heart fails me. There was yet

another stoppage! And we drove at last into Calistoga past two in the

afternoon, Fanny and I having breakfasted at six in the morning, eight

mortal hours before. We were a pallid couple; but still the Jews were

smiling.

So ended our excursion with the village usurers, and, now that it was

done, we had no more idea of the nature of the business, nor of the part

we had been playing in it, than the child unborn. That all the people we

had met were the slaves of Kelmar, though in various degrees of

servitude; that we ourselves had been sent up the mountain in the

interests of none but Kelmar; that the money we laid out, dollar by

dollar, cent by cent, and through the hands of various intermediaries,

should all hop ultimately into Kelmar's till; these were facts that we

only grew to recognise in the course of time and by the accumulation of

evidence. At length all doubt was quieted, when one of the

kettle-holders confessed. Stopping his trap in the moonlight, a little

way out of Calistoga, he told me, in so many words, that he dare not

show face there with an empty pocket. "You see, I don't mind if it was

only five dollars, Mr. Stevens," he said, "but I must give Mr. Kelmar

_something_."

Even now, when the whole tyranny is plain to me, I cannot find it in my

heart to be as angry as perhaps I should be with the Hebrew tyrant. The

whole game of business is beggar my neighbour; and though perhaps that

game looks uglier when played at such close quarters and on so small a

scale, it is none the more intrinsically inhumane for that. The village

usurer is not so sad a feature of humanity and human progress as the

millionaire manufacturer, fattening on the toil and loss of thousands,

and yet declaiming from the platform against the greed and dishonesty of

landlords. If it were fair for Cobden to buy up land from owners whom he

thought unconscious of its proper, value, it was fair enough for my

Russian Jew to give credit to his farmers. Kelmar, if he was unconscious

of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent in the matter of his

brother's mote.

THE ACT OF SQUATTING

There were four of us squatters--myself and my wife, the King and Queen

of Silverado; Lloyd, the Crown Prince; and Chuchu, the Grand Duke.

Chuchu, a setter crossed with spaniel, was the most unsuited for a rough

life. He had been nurtured tenderly in the society of ladies; his heart

was large and soft; he regarded the sofa-cushion as a bed-rock necessary

of existence. Though about the size of a sheep, he loved to sit in

ladies' laps; he never said a bad word in all his blameless days; and if

he had seen a flute, I am sure he could have played upon it by nature.

It may seem hard to say it of a dog, but Chuchu was a tame cat.

The king and queen, the grand duke, and a basket of cold provender for

immediate use, set forth from Calistoga in a double buggy; the crown

prince, on horseback, led the way like an outrider. Bags and boxes and a

second-hand stove were to follow close upon our heels by Hanson's team.

It was a beautiful still day; the sky was one field of azure. Not a leaf

moved, not a speck appeared in heaven. Only from the summit of the

mountain one little snowy wisp of cloud after another kept detaching

itself, like smoke from a volcano, and blowing southward in some high

stream of air: Mount Saint Helena still at her interminable task, making

the weather, like a Lapland witch.

By noon we had come in sight of the mill: a great brown building,

half-way up the hill, big as a factory, two stories high, and with tanks

and ladders along the roof; which, as a pendicle of Silverado mine, we

held to be an outlying province of our own. Thither, then, we went,

crossing the valley by a grassy trail; and there lunched out of the

basket, sitting in a kind of portico, and wondering, while we ate, at

this great bulk of useless building. Through a chink we could look far

down into the interior, and see sunbeams floating in the dust and

striking on tier after tier of silent, rusty machinery. It cost six

thousand dollars, twelve hundred English sovereigns; and now, here it

stands deserted, like the temple of a forgotten religion, the busy

millers toiling somewhere else. All the time we were there, mill and

mill town showed no sign of life; that part of the mountain side, which

is very open and green, was tenanted by no living creature but ourselves

and the insects; and nothing stirred but the cloud manufactory upon the

mountain summit. It was odd to compare this with the former days, when

the engine was in full blast, the mill palpitating to its strokes, and

the carts came rattling down from Silverado, charged with ore.

By two we had been landed at the mine, the buggy was gone again, and we

were left to our own reflections and the basket of cold provender, until

Hanson should arrive. Hot as it was by the sun, there was something

chill in such a home-coming, in that world of wreck and rust, splinter

and rolling gravel, where for so many years no fire had smoked.

Silverado platform filled the whole width of the canyon. Above, as I have

said, this was a wild, red, stony gully in the mountains; but below it

was a wooded dingle. And through this, I was told, there had gone a path

between the mine and the Toll House--our natural north-west passage to

civilisation. I found and followed it, clearing my way as I went through

fallen branches and dead trees. It went straight down that steep canyon,

till it brought you out abruptly over the roofs of the hotel. There was

nowhere any break in the descent. It almost seemed as if, were you to

drop a stone down the old iron chute at our platform, it would never

rest until it hopped upon the Toll House shingles. Signs were not

wanting of the ancient greatness of Silverado. The footpath was well

marked, and had been well trodden in the old days by thirsty miners. And

far down, buried in foliage, deep out of sight of Silverado, I came on a

last outpost of the mine--a mound of gravel, some wreck of wooden

aqueduct, and the mouth of a tunnel, like a treasure grotto in a fairy

story. A stream of water, fed by the invisible leakage from our shaft,

and dyed red with cinnabar or iron, ran trippingly forth out of the

bowels of the cave; and, looking far under the arch, I could see

something like an iron lantern fastened on the rocky wall. It was a

promising spot for the imagination. No boy could have left it

unexplored.

The stream thenceforward stole along the bottom of the dingle, and made,

for that dry land, a pleasant warbling in the leaves. Once, I suppose,

it ran splashing down the whole length of the canyon, but now its head

waters had been tapped by the shaft at Silverado, and for a great part

of its course it wandered sunless among the joints of the mountain. No

wonder that it should better its pace when it sees, far before it,

daylight whitening in the arch, or that it should come trotting forth

into the sunlight with a song.

The two stages had gone by when I got down, and the Toll House stood,

dozing in sun and dust and silence, like a place enchanted. My mission

was after hay for bedding, and that I was readily promised. But when I

mentioned that we were waiting for Rufe, the people shook their heads.

Rufe was not a regular man anyway, it seemed; and if he got playing

poker----Well, poker was too many for Rufe. I had not yet heard them

bracketed together; but it seemed a natural conjunction, and commended

itself swiftly to my fears; and as soon as I returned to Silverado and

had told my story, we practically gave Hanson up, and set ourselves to

do what we could find do-able in our desert-island state.

The lower room had been the assayer's office. The floor was thick with

_debris_--part human, from the former occupants; part natural, sifted in

by mountain winds. In a sea of red dust there swam or floated sticks,

boards, hay, straw, stones, and paper; ancient newspapers, above

all--for the newspaper, especially when torn, soon becomes an

antiquity--and bills of the Silverado boarding-house, some dated

Silverado, some Calistoga Mine. Here is one, verbatim; and if any one

can calculate the scale of charges, he has my envious admiration.

Calistoga Mine, May 3rd, 1875.

John Stanley

To S. Chapman, Cr.

To board from April 1st, to April 30 $25 75

" " " May 1st, to 3rd 2 00

------

27 75

Where is John Stanley mining now? Where is S. Chapman, within whose

hospitable walls we were to lodge? The date was but five years old, but

in that time the world had changed for Silverado; like Palmyra in the

desert, it had outlived its people and its purpose; we camped, like

Layard, amid ruins, and these names spoke to us of prehistoric time. A

boot-jack, a pair of boots, a dog-hutch, and these bills of Mr.

Chapman's were the only speaking relics that we disinterred from all

that vast Silverado rubbish-heap; but what would I not have given to

unearth a letter, a pocket-book, a diary, only a ledger, or a roll of

names, to take me back, in a more personal manner, to the past? It

pleases me, besides, to fancy that Stanley or Chapman, or one of their

companions, may light upon this chronicle, and be struck by the name,

and read some news of their anterior home, coming, as it were, out of a

subsequent epoch of history in that quarter of the world.

As we were tumbling the mingled rubbish on the floor, kicking it with

our feet, and groping for these written evidences of the past, Lloyd,

with a somewhat whitened face, produced a paper bag. "What's this?" said

he. It contained a granulated powder, something the colour of Gregory's

Mixture, but rosier; and as there were several of the bags, and each

more or less broken, the powder was spread widely on the floor. Had any

of us ever seen giant powder? No, nobody had; and instantly there grew

up in my mind a shadowy belief, verging with every moment nearer to

certitude, that I had somewhere heard somebody describe it as just such

a powder as the one around us. I have learnt since that it is a

substance not unlike tallow, and is made up in rolls for all the world

like tallow candles.

Fanny, to add to our happiness, told us a story of a gentleman who had

camped one night, like ourselves, by a deserted mine. He was a handy,

thrifty fellow, and looked right and left for plunder, but all he could

lay his hands on was a can of oil. After dark he had to see to the

horses with a lantern; and not to miss an opportunity, filled up his

lamp from the oil can. Thus equipped, he set forth into the forest. A

little while after, his friends heard a loud explosion; the mountain

echoes bellowed, and then all was still. On examination, the can proved

to contain oil, with the trifling addition of nitro-glycerine; but no

research disclosed a trace of either man or lantern.

It was a pretty sight, after this anecdote, to see us sweeping out the

giant powder. It seemed never to be far enough away. And, after all, it

was only some rock pounded for assay.

So much for the lower room. We scraped some of the rougher dirt off the

floor, and left it. That was our sitting-room and kitchen, though there

was nothing to sit upon but the table, and no provision for a fire

except a hole in the roof of the room above, which had once contained

the chimney of a stove.

To that upper room we now proceeded. There were the eighteen bunks in a

double tier, nine on either hand, where from eighteen to thirty-six

miners had once snored together all night long, John Stanley, perhaps,

snoring loudest. There was the roof, with a hole in it through which the

sun now shot an arrow. There was the floor, in much the same state as

the one below, though, perhaps, there was more hay, and certainly there

was the added ingredient of broken glass, the man who stole the

window-frames having apparently made a miscarriage with this one.

Without a broom, without hay or bedding, we could but look about us with

a beginning of despair. The one bright arrow of day, in that gaunt and

shattered barrack, made the rest look dirtier and darker, and the sight

drove us at last into the open.

Here, also, the handiwork of man lay ruined: but the plants were all

alive and thriving; the view below was fresh with the colours of nature;

and we had exchanged a dim, human garret for a corner, even although it

were untidy, of the blue hall of heaven. Not a bird, not a beast, not a

reptile. There was no noise in that part of the world, save when we

passed beside the staging, and heard the water musically falling in the

shaft.

We wandered to and fro. We searched among that drift of lumber--wood and

iron, nails and rails, and sleepers and the wheels of trucks. We gazed

up the cleft into the bosom of the mountain. We sat by the margin of the

dump and saw, far below us, the green treetops standing still in the

clear air. Beautiful perfumes, breaths of bay, resin, and nutmeg, came

to us more often and grew sweeter and sharper as the afternoon declined.

But still there was no word of Hanson.

I set to with pick and shovel, and deepened the pool behind the shaft,

till we were sure of sufficient water for the morning; and by the time I

had finished, the sun had begun to go down behind the mountain shoulder,

the platform was plunged in quiet shadow, and a chill descended from the

sky. Night began early in our cleft. Before us, over the margin of the

dump, we could see the sun still striking aslant into the wooded nick

below, and on the battlemented, pine-bescattered ridges on the farther

side.

There was no stove, of course, and no hearth in our lodging, so we

betook ourselves to the blacksmith's forge across the platform. If the

platform be taken as a stage, and the out-curving margin of the dump to

represent the line of the footlights, then our house would be the first

wing on the actor's left, and this blacksmith's forge, although no match

for it in size, the foremost on the right. It was a low, brown cottage,

planted close against the hill, and overhung by the foliage and peeling

boughs of a madrona thicket. Within it was full of dead leaves and

mountain dust, and rubbish from the mine. But we soon had a good fire

brightly blazing, and sat close about it on impromptu seats. Chuchu, the

slave of sofa cushions, whimpered for a softer bed; but the rest of us

were greatly revived and comforted by that good creature--fire, which

gives us warmth and light and companionable sounds, and colours up the

emptiest building with better than frescoes. For awhile it was even

pleasant in the forge, with the blaze in the midst, and a look over our

shoulders on the woods and mountains where the day was dying like a

dolphin.

It was between seven and eight before Hanson arrived, with a waggonful

of our effects and two of his wife's relatives to lend him a hand. The

elder showed surprising strength. He would pick up a huge packing-case,

full of books, of all things, swing it on his shoulder, and away up the

two crazy ladders and the breakneck spout of rolling mineral, familiarly

termed a path, that led from the cart-track to our house. Even for a man

unburthened, the ascent was toilsome and precarious; but Irvine scaled

it with a light foot, carrying box after box, as the hero whisks the

stage child up the practicable footway beside the waterfall of the fifth

act. With so strong a helper, the business was speedily transacted. Soon

the assayer's office was thronged with our belongings, piled

higgledy-piggledy, and upside down, about the floor. There were our

boxes, indeed, but my wife had left her keys in Calistoga. There was the

stove, but, alas! our carriers had forgot the chimney, and lost one of

the plates along the road. The Silverado problem was scarce solved.

Rufe himself was grave and good-natured over his share of blame; he

even, if I remember right, expressed regret. But his crew, to my

astonishment and anger, grinned from ear to ear, and laughed aloud at

our distress. They thought it "real funny" about the stovepipe they had

forgotten; "real funny" that they should have lost a plate. As for hay,

the whole party refused to bring us any till they should have supped.

See how late they were! Never had there been such a job as coming up

that grade! Nor often, I suspect, such a game of poker as that before

they started. But about nine, as a particular favour, we should have

some hay.

So they took their departure, leaving me still staring, and we resigned

ourselves to wait for their return. The fire in the forge had been

suffered to go out, and we were one and all too weary to kindle another.

We dined, or not to take that word in vain, we ate after a fashion, in

the nightmare disorder of the assayer's office, perched among boxes. A

single candle lighted us. It could scarce be called a house-warming; for

there was, of course, no fire, and with the two open doors and the open

window gaping on the night, like breaches in a fortress, it began to

grow rapidly chill. Talk ceased; nobody moved but the unhappy Chuchu,

still in quest of sofa-cushions, who tumbled complainingly among the

trunks. It required a certain happiness of disposition to look forward

hopefully, from so dismal a beginning, across the brief hours of night,

to the warm shining of to-morrow's sun.

But the hay arrived at last, and we turned, with our last spark of

courage, to the bedroom. We had improved the entrance, but it was still

a kind of rope-walking; and it would have been droll to see us

mounting, one after another, by candle light, under the open stars.

The western door--that which looked up the canyon, and through which we

entered by our bridge of flying plank--was still entire, a handsome,

panelled door, the most finished piece of carpentry in Silverado. And

the two lowest bunks next to this we roughly filled with hay for that

night's use. Through the opposite, or eastern-looking gable, with its

open door and window, a faint, diffused starshine came into the room

like mist; and when we were once in bed, we lay, awaiting sleep, in a

haunted, incomplete obscurity. At first the silence of the night was

utter. Then a high wind began in the distance among the treetops, and

for hours continued to grow higher. It seemed to me much such a wind as

we had found on our visit; yet here in our open chamber we were fanned

only by gentle and refreshing draughts, so deep was the canyon, so close

our house was planted under the overhanging rock.

THE HUNTER'S FAMILY

There is quite a large race or class of people in America, for whom we

scarcely seem to have a parallel in England. Of pure white blood, they

are unknown or unrecognisable in towns; inhabit the fringe of

settlements and the deep, quiet places of the country; rebellious to all

labour, and pettily thievish, like the English gipsies; rustically

ignorant, but with a touch of woodlore and the dexterity of the savage.

Whence they came is a moot point. At the time of the war, they poured

north in thousands to escape the conscription; lived during summer on

fruits, wild animals, and petty theft; and at the approach of winter,

when these supplies failed, built great fires in the forest, and there

died stoically by starvation. They are widely scattered, however, and

easily recognised. Loutish, but not ill-looking, they will sit all day,

swinging their legs on a field fence, the mind seemingly as devoid of

all reflection as a Suffolk peasant's, careless of politics, for the

most part incapable of reading, but with a rebellious vanity and a

strong sense of independence. Hunting is their most congenial business,

or, if the occasion offers, a little amateur detection. In tracking a

criminal, following a particular horse along a beaten highway, and

drawing inductions from a hair or a footprint, one of these somnolent,

grinning Hodges will suddenly display activity of body and finesse of

mind. By their names ye may know them, the women figuring as Loveina,

Larsenia, Serena, Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to Alvin, Alva, or

Orion, pronounced Orrion, with the accent on the first. Whether they are

indeed a race, or whether this is the form of degeneracy common to all

backwoodsmen, they are at least known by a generic byword, as Poor

Whites or Low-downers.